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PAX VOBISCUM 



PAX VOBISCUM 



/ BY 

HENRY DRUMMOND, F.R.S.E., F.G.S., LL.D. 

AUTHOR OF " NATURAL LAW IN THE SPIRITUAL WORLD," 
u . TROPICAL AFRICA," ETC 



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THIRD EDITION, REVISED 



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JAMES POTT & CO., Publishers 

14 and 16 Astor Place 

1891 






Copyright, 1890, by 
JAMES POTT & CO. 



Press of J. J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place, New York. 



V, 



"Pax Vobiscum," prepared for publication 

by the Author, is now published for the first 

time, being the second of a series of which 

" The Greatest Thing in the World " was the 

first. 

James Pott & Co. 

Nov. i, 189a 



"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn 
of me ; for I am meek and lowly in heart : and ye shall find 
rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden 
is light." 



CONTENTS. 

Page 

Preface, 5 

Pax Vobiscum, 11 

Effects Require Causes, . . .17 
What Yokes are for, ... 40 
How Fruits Grow, . . . .49 




PAX VOBISCUM. 

I HEARD the other morning a sermon by a 
distinguished preacher upon " Rest." It was 
full of beautiful thoughts ; but when I came 
to ask myself, " How does he say I can get 
Rest?" there was no answer. The sermon 
was sincerely meant to be practical, yet it con- 
tained no experience that seemed to me to be 
tangible, nor any advice which could help me 
to find the thing itself as I went about the 
world that afternoon. Yet this omission of the 
only important problem was not the fault of 
the preacher. The whole popular religion is 



12 PAX VOBISCUM. 

in the twilight here. And when pressed for 
really working specifics for the experiences 
with which it deals, it falters, and seems to 
lose itself in mist. 

The want of connection between the great 
words of religion and every-day life has be- 
wildered and discouraged all of us. Chris- 
tianity possesses the noblest words in the 
language ; its literature overflows with terms 
expressive of the greatest and happiest moods 
which can fill the soul of man. Rest, Joy, 
Peace, Faith, Love, Light — these words occur 
with such persistency in hymns and prayers 
that an observer might think they formed 
the staple of Christian experience. But on 
coming to close quarters with the actual life 
of most of us, how surely would he be dis- 
enchanted. I do not think we ourselves are 
aware how much our religious life is made up 



PEACE BE WITH YOU. 1 3 

of phrases ; how much of what we call Christian 
experience is only a dialect of the Churches, 
a mere religious phraseology with almost 
nothing behind it in what we really feel and 
know. 

To some of us, indeed, the Christian ex- 
periences seem further away than when we 
took the first steps in the Christian life. That 
life has not opened out as we had hoped ; we 
do not regret our religion, but we are dis- 
appointed with it. There are times, perhaps, 
when wandering notes from a diviner music 
stray into our spirits ; but these experiences 
come at few and fitful moments. We have no 
sense of possession in them. When they visit 
us, it is a surprise. When they leave us, 
it is without explanation. When we wish 
their return, we do not know how to secure 
it. 



14 PAX VOBISCUM. 

All which points to a religion without solid 
base, and a poor and flickering life. It means 
a great bankruptcy in those experiences which 
give Christianity its personal solace and make 
it attractive to the world, and a great uncer- 
tainty as to any remedy. It is as if we knew 
everything about health — except the way to 
get it. 

I am quite sure that the difficulty does not 
lie in the fact that men are not in earnest. 
This is simply not the fact. All around us 
Christians are wearing themselves out in try- 
ing to be better. The amount of spiritual 
longing in the world — in the hearts of un- 
numbered thousands of men and women in 
whom we should never suspect it ; among the 
wise and thoughtful ; among the young and 
gay, who seldom assuage and never betray 
their thirst — this is one of the most wonderful 



PEACE BE WITH YOU. 1 5 

and touching facts of life. It is not more 
heat that is needed, but more light ; not more 
force, but a wiser direction to be given to 
very real energies already there. 

The Address which follows is offered as a 
humble contribution to this problem, and in 
the hope that it may help some who are 
" seeking Rest and finding none " to a firmer 
footing on one great, solid, simple principle 
which underlies not the Christian experiences 
alone, but all experiences, and all life. 

What Christian experience wants is thready 
a vertebral column, method. It is impossible 
to believe that there is no remedy for its 
unevenness and dishevelment, or that the 
remedy is a secret. The idea, also, that some 
few men, by happy chance or happier tem- 
perament, have been given the secret — as if 
there were some sort of knack or trick of it — 



l6 PAX VOBISCUM. 

is wholly incredible. Religion must ripen its 
fruit for every temperament ; and the way 
even into its highest heights must be by a 
gateway through which the peoples of the 
world may pass. 

I shall try to lead up to this gateway by 
a very familiar path. But as that path is 
strangely unfrequented, and even unknown, 
where it passes into the religious sphere, I 
must dwell for a moment on the commonest 
of commonplaces. 




EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 

NOTHING that happens in the world hap- 
pens by chance. God is a God of order. 
Everything is arranged upon definite prin- 
ciples, and never at random. The world, even 
the religious world, is governed by law. 
Character is governed by law. Happiness is 
governed by law. The Christian experiences 
are governed by law. Men, forgetting this, 
expect Rest, Joy, Peace, Faith to drop into 
their souls from the air like snow or rain. But 
in point of fact they do not do so ; and if 
they did they would no less have their origin 
in previous activities and be controlled by 



1 8 PAX VOBISCUM. 

natural laws. Rain and snow do drop from 
the air, but not without a long previous 
history. They are the mature effects of for- 
mer causes. Equally so are Rest, and Peace, 
and Joy. They, too, have each a previous 
history. Storms and winds and calms are not 
accidents, but are brought about by ante- 
cedent circumstances. Rest and Peace are 
but calms in man's inward nature, and arise 
through causes as definite and as inevitable. 

Realize it thoroughly: it is a methodical 
not an accidental world. If a housewife 
turns out a good cake, it is the result of a 
sound receipt, carefully applied. She cannot 
mix the assigned ingredients and fire them 
for the appropriate time without producing 
the result. It is not she who has made the 
cake ; it is nature. She brings related things 
together ; sets causes at work ; these causes 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 19 

bring about the result. She is not a creator, 
but an intermediary. She does not expect 
random causes to produce specific effects 
— random ingredients would only produce 
random cakes. So it is in the making of 
Christian experiences. Certain lines are fol- 
lowed ; certain effects are the result. These 
effects cannot but be the result. But the 
result can never take place without the pre- 
vious cause. To expect results without ante- 
cedents is to expect cakes without ingredients. 
That impossibility is precisely the almost 
universal expectation. 

Now what I mainly wish to do is to help 
you firmly to grasp this simple principle of 
Cause and Effect in the spiritual world. 
And instead of applying the principle gen- 
erally to each of the Christian experiences 
in turn, I shall examine its application to 



20 PAX VOBISCUM. 



one in some little detail. The one I shall 
select is Rest. And I think any one who 
follows the application in this single instance 
will be able to apply it for himself to all the 
others. 

Take such a sentence as this : African 
explorers are subject to fevers which cause 
restlessness and delirium. Note the expres- 
sion, " cause restlessness." Restlessness has a 
cause. Clearly, then, any one who wished to 
get rid of restlessness would proceed at once 
to deal with the cause. If that were not 
removed, a doctor might prescribe a hundred 
things, and all might be taken in turn, with- 
out producing the least effect. Things are so 
arranged in the original planning of the world 
that certain effects must follow certain causes, 
and certain causes must be abolished before 
certain effects can be removed. Certain parts 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 21 

of Africa are inseparably linked with the 
physical experience called fever; this fever 
is in turn infallibly linked with a mental 
experience called restlessness and delirium. 
To abolish the mental experience the radical 
method would be to abolish the physical 
experience, and the way of abolishing the 
physical experience would be to abolish 
Africa, or to cease to go there. Now this 
holds good for all other forms of Restless-, 
ness. Every other form and kind of Rest- 
lessness in the world has a definite cause, 
and the particular kind of Restlessness can 
only be removed by removing the allotted 
cause. 

All this is also true of Rest. Restlessness 
has a cause : must not Rest have a cause ? 
Necessarily. If it were a chance world we 
would not expect this ; but, being a methodi- 



22 PAX VOBISCUM. 

cal world, it cannot be otherwise. Rest, 
physical rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every 
kind of rest has a cause, as certainly as rest- 
lessness. Now causes, are discriminating. 
There is one kind of cause for every particu- 
lar effect, and no other ; and if one particular 
effect is desired, the corresponding cause must 
be set in motion. It is no use proposing 
finely devised schemes, or going through 
general pious exercises in the hope that some- 
how Rest will come. The Christian life is not 
casual but causal. All nature is a standing 
protest against the absurdity of expecting to 
secure spiritual effects, or any effects, without 
the employment of appropriate causes. The 
Great Teacher dealt what ought to have been 
the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by a 
single question, "Do men gather grapes of 
thorns or figs of thistles ? " 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 



Why, then, did the Great Teacher not 
educate His followers fully ? Why did He 
not tell us, for example, how such a thing 
as Rest might be obtained ? The answer 
is, that He did. But plainly, explicitly, in 
so many words? Yes, plainly, explicitly, in 
so many words. He assigned Rest to its 
cause, in words with which each of us has 
been familiar from his earliest childhood. 

He begins, you remember — for you at 
once know the passage I refer to — almost 
as if Rest could be had without any cause: 
" Come unto me," He says, " and I will give 
you Rest." 

Rest, apparently, was a favour to be be- 
stowed ; men had but to come to Him ; He 
would give it to every applicant. But the 
next sentence takes that all back. The 
qualification, indeed, is added instantane- 



24 PAX VOBISCUM. 



ously. For what the first sentence seemed 
to give was next thing to an impossibility. 
For how, in a literal sense, can Rest be 
given ? One could no more give away Rest 
than he could give away Laughter. We 
speak of " causing " laughter, which we can 
do ; but we cannot give it away. When we 
speak of giving pain, we know perfectly 
well we cannot give pain away. And when 
we aim at giving pleasure, all that we do 
is to arrange a set of circumstances in such 
a way as that these shall cause pleasure. 
Of course there is a sense, and a very won- 
derful sense, in which a Great Personality 
breathes upon all who come within its influ- 
ence an abiding peace and trust. Men can 
be to other men as the shadow of a great rock 
in a thirsty land. Much more Christ ; much 
more Christ as Perfect Man ; much more still 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 



as Saviour of the world. But it is not this of 
which I speak. When Christ said He would 
give men Rest, He meant simply that He 
would put them in the way of it. By no act 
of conveyance would, or could, He make over 
His own Rest to them. He could give 
them His receipt for it. That was all. But 
He would not make it for them ; for one 
thing, it was not in His plan to make it 
for them ; for another thing, men were not 
so planned that it could be made for 
them ; and for yet another thing, it was a 
thousand times better that they should 
make it for themselves. 

That this is the meaning becomes obvious 
from the wording of the second sentence : 
" Learn of Me and ye shall find Rest." Rest, 
that is to say, is not a thing that can be given, 
but a thing to be acquired. It comes not by 



26 PAX VOBISCUM. 



an act, but by a process. It is not to be found 
in a happy hour, as one finds a treasure ; but 
slowly, as one finds knowledge. It could 
indeed be no more found in a moment than 
could knowledge. A soil has to be prepared 
for it. Like a fine fruit, it will grow in one 
climate and not in another ; at one altitude 
and not at another. Like all growths it will 
have an orderly development and mature by 
slow degrees. 

The nature of this slow process Christ 
clearly defines when He says we are to achieve 
Rest by learning. " Learn of Me," He says, 
" and ye shall find rest to your souls." Now 
consider the extraordinary originality of this 
utterance. How novel the connection be- 
tween these two words, "Learn" and "Rest "? 
How few of us have ever associated them — 
ever thought that Rest was a thing to be 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 2J 

learned ; ever laid ourselves out for it as we 
would to learn a language ; ever practised it 
as we would practise the violin ? Does it not 
show how entirely new Christ's teaching still 
is to the world, that so old and threadbare an 
aphorism should still be so little applied? The 
last thing most of us would have thought of 
would have been to associate Rest with Work. 
What must one work at? What is that 
which if duly learned will find the soul of man 
in Rest? Christ answers without the least 
hesitation. He specifies two things — Meek- 
ness and Lowliness. " Learn of Me," He says, 
" for I am meek and lowly in heart." Now 
these two things are not chosen at random. 
To these accomplishments, in a special way, 
Rest is attached. Learn these, in short, and 
you have already found Rest. These as they 
stand are direct causes of Rest ; will produce 



28 PAX VOBISCUM. 

it at once; cannot but produce it at once. 
And if you think for a single moment, you 
will see how this is necessarily so, for causes 
are never arbitrary, and the connection be- 
tween antecedent and consequent here and 
everywhere lies deep in the nature of things. 

What is the connection, then? I answer 
by a further question. What are the chief 
causes of Unrest ? If you know yourself, you 
will answer Pride, Selfishness, Ambition. As 
you look back upon the past years of your 
life, is it not true that its unhappiness has 
chiefly come from the succession of personal 
mortifications and almost trivial disappoint- 
ments which the intercourse of life has 
brought you? Great trials come at length- 
ened intervals, and we rise to breast them ; 
but it is the petty friction of our every-day 
life with one another, the jar of business or of 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 2g 



work, the discord of the domestic circle, the 
collapse of our ambition, the crossing of our 
will or the taking down of our conceit, which 
make inward peace impossible. Wounded 
vanity, then, disappointed hopes, unsatisfied 
selfishness — these are the old, vulgar, univer- 
sal sources of man's unrest. 

Now it is obvious why Christ pointed out 
as the two chief objects for attainment the 
exact opposites of these. To Meekness and 
Lowliness these things simply do not exist. 
They cure unrest by making it impossible. 
These remedies do not trifle with surface 
symptoms; they strike at once at removing 
causes. The ceaseless chagrin of a self-centred 
life can be removed at -once by learning Meek- 
ness and Lowliness of heart. He who learns 
them is forever proof against it. He lives 
henceforth a charmed life. Christianity is a 



30 PAX VOBISCUM. 

fine inoculation, a transfusion of healthy blood 
into an anaemic or poisoned soul. Xo fever 
can attack a perfectly sound body ; no fever of 
unrest can disturb a soul which has breathed 
the air or learned the ways of Christ. Men 
sigh for the wings of a dove that they may fly 
away and be at Rest. But flying away will not 
help us. " The Kingdom of God is within your 
We aspire to the top to look for Rest ; it lies 
at the bottom. Water rests only when it gets 
to the lowest place. So do men. Hence, be 
lowly. The man who has no opinion of him- 
self at all can never be hurt if others do not 
acknowledge him. Hence, be meek. He who 
is without expectation cannot fret if nothing 
comes to him. It is self-evident that these 
things are so. The lowly man and the meek 
man are really above all other men, above all 
other things. They dominate the world be- 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 3 1 

cause they do not care for it. The miser does 
not possess gold, gold possesses him. But the 
meek possess it. " The meek," said Christ, 
" inherit the earth." They do not buy it ; 
they do not conquer it ; but they inherit it. 

There are people who go about the world 
looking out for slights, and they are neces- 
sarily miserable, for they find them at every 
turn — especially the imaginary ones. One 
has the same pity for such men as for the very 
poor. They are the morally illiterate. They 
have had no real education, for they have 
never learned how to live. Few men know 
how to live. We grow up at random, carrying 
into mature life the merely animal methods 
and motives which we had as little children. 
And it does not occur to us that all this must 
be changed ; that much of it must be reversed ; 
that life is the finest of the Fine Arts ; that it 



32 PAX VOBISCUM. 

has to be learned with lifelong patience, and 
that the years of our pilgrimage are all too 
short to master it triumphantly. 

Yet this is what Christianity is for — to 
teach men the Art of Life. And its whole 
curriculum lies in one word — " Learn of me." 
Unlike most education, this is almost purely 
personal ; it is not to be had from books or 
lectures .or creeds or doctrines. It is a study 
from the life. Christ never said much in mere 
words about the Christian graces. He lived 
them, He was them. Yet we do not merely 
copy Him. We learn His art by living with 
Him, like the old apprentices with their mas- 
ters. 

Now we understand it all ? Christ's invita- 
tion to the weary and heavy-laden is a call to 
begin life over again upon a new principle — 
upon His own principle. " Watch My way of 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 33 

doing things," He says. " Follow Me. Take 

life as I take it. Be meek and lowly and you 

will find Rest." 

I do not say, remember, that the Christian 

life to every man, or to any man, can be a 

bed of roses. No educational process can 

be this. And perhaps if some men knew 

how much was involved in the simple " learn " 

of Christ, they would not enter His school 

with so irresponsible a heart. For there is not 

only much to learn, but much to unlearn. 

Many men never go to this school at all till 

their disposition is already half ruined and 

character has taken on its fatal set. To learn 

arithmetic is difficult at fifty — much more to 

learn Christianity. To learn simply what it is 

to be meek and lowly, in the case of one who 

has had no lessons in that in childhood, may 

cost him half of what he values most on earth, 
3 



34 PAX VOBISCUM. 



Do we realize, for instance, that the way of 
teaching humility is generally by humiliation ? 
There is probably no other school for it. 
When a man enters himself as a pupil in such 
a school it means a very great thing. There 
is much Rest there, but there is also much 
Work. 

I should be wrong, even though my theme 
is the brighter side, to ignore the cross and 
minimise the cost. Only it gives to the cross 
a more definite meaning, and a rarer value, to 
connect it thus directly and causally with the 
growth of the inner life. Our platitudes 
on the " benefits of affliction " are usually 
about as vague as our theories of Christian 
Experience. " Somehow," we believe afflic- 
tion does us good. But it is not a question of 
" Somehow." The result is definite, calcu- 
lable, necessary. It is under the strictest law 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 35 

of cause and effect. The first effect of losing 
one's fortune, for instance, is humiliation ; 
and the effect of humiliation, as we have just 
seen, is to make one humble ; and the effect 
of being humble is to produce Rest. It is 
a roundabout way, apparently, of producing 
Rest ; but Nature generally works by circu- 
lar processes ; and it is not certain that there 
is any other way of becoming humble, or of 
finding Rest. If a man could make himself 
humble to order, it might simplify matters, 
but we do not find that this happens. Hence 
we must all go through the mill. Hence 
death, death to the lower self, is the nearest 
gate and the quickest road to life. 

Yet this is only half the truth. Christ's life 
outwardly was one of the most troubled lives 
that was ever lived : Tempest and tumult, 
tumult and tempest, the waves breaking over 



3^ PAX VOBISCUM. 

it all the time till the worn body was laid in the 
grave. But the inner life was a sea of glass. 
The great calm was always there. At any 
moment you might have gone to Him and 
found Rest. And even when the blood- 
hounds were dogging him in the streets of 
Jerusalem, He turned to His disciples and 
offered them, as a last legacy, " My peace." 
Nothing ever for a moment broke the serenity 
of Christ's life on earth. Misfortune could 
not reach Him ; He had no fortune. Food, 
raiment, money — fountain-heads of half the 
world's weariness — He simply did not care 
for ; they played no part in His life ; He 
" took no thought " for them. It was impos- 
sible to affect Him by lowering His reputation ; 
He had already made Himself of no reputation. 
He was dumb before insult. When He was 
reviled He reviled not again. In fact, there 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 37 

was nothing that the world could do to Him 
that could ruffle the surface of His spirit. 

Such living, as mere living, is altogether 
unique. It is only when we see what it was 
in Him that we can know what the word Rest 
means. It lies not in emotions, nor in the 
absence of emotions. It is not a hallowed 
feeling that comes over us in church. It is 
not something that the preacher has in his 
voice. It is not in nature, or in poetry, or 
in music — though in all these there is sooth- 
ing. It is the mind at leisure from itself. 
It is the perfect poise of the soul ; the abso- 
lute adjustment of the inward man to the 
stress of all outward things ; the prepared- 
ness against every emergency ; the stability 
of assured convictions ; the eternal calm of an 
invulnerable faith ; the repose of a heart set 
deep in God. It is the mood of the man who 



38 PAX VOBISCUM. 

says, with Browning, " God's in His Heaven, 
all's well with the world." 

Two painters each painted a picture to 
illustrate his conception of rest. The first 
chose for his scene a still, lone lake among 
the far-off mountains. The second threw on 
his canvas a thundering waterfall, with a fra- 
gile birch-tree bending over the foam ; at the 
fork of a branch, almost wet with the cata- 
ract's spray, a robin sat on its nest. The first 
was only Stagnation ; the last was Rest. For 
in Rest there are always two elements — 
tranquillity and energy ; silence and turbu- 
lence ; creation and destruction ; fearlessness 
and fearfulness. This it was in Christ. 

It is quite plain from all this that whatever 
else He claimed to be or to do, He at least 
knew how to live. All this is the perfection 
of living, of living in the mere sense of passing 



EFFECTS REQUIRE CAUSES. 39 

through the world in the best way. Hence 
His anxiety to communicate His idea of life 
to others. He came, He said, to give men 
life, true life, a more abundant life than they 
were living ; " the life," as the fine phrase in 
the Revised Version has it, " that is life 
indeed." This is what He himself possessed, 
and it was this which He offers to all man- 
kind. And hence His direct appeal for all to 
come to Him who had not made much of life, 
who were weary and heavy-laden. These He 
would teach His secret. They, also, should 
know "the life that is life indeed." 



V." 





WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 

There is still one doubt to clear up. After 
the statement, " Learn of Me," Christ throws in 
the disconcerting qualification, " Take My yoke 
upon you and learn of Me." Why, if all this 
be true, does He call it a yoke f Why, while 
professing to give Rest, does He with the next 
breath whisper " burden " ? Is the Christian 
life, after all, what its enemies take it for — an 
additional weight to the already great woe of 
life, some extra punctiliousness about duty, 
some painful devotion to observances, some 
heavy restriction and trammelling of all that is 
joyous and free in the world ? Is life not hard 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 4 1 

and sorrowful enough without being fettered 
with yet another yoke ? 

It is astounding how so glaring a misunder- 
standing of this plain sentence should ever 
have passed into currency. Did you ever stop 
to ask what a yoke is really for ? Is it to be a 
burden to the animal which wears it? It is 
just the opposite. It is to make its burden 
light. Attached to the oxen in any other way 
than by a yoke, the plough would be intoler- 
able. Worked by means of a yoke, it is light. 
A yoke is not an instrument of torture ; it is an 
instrument of mercy. It is not a malicious 
contrivance for making work hard ; it is a 
gentle device to make hard labour light. It is 
not meant to give pain, but to save pain. And 
yet men speak of the yoke of Christ as if it 
were a slavery, and look upon those who wear 
it as objects of compassion. For generations 



42 PAX VOBISCUM. 

we have had homilies on " The Yoke of 
Christ," some delighting in portraying its nar- 
row exactions ; some seeking in these exactions 
the marks of its divinity ; others apologising for 
it, and toning it down ; still others assuring 
us that, although it be very bad, it is not to 
be compared with the positive blessings of 
Christianity. How many, especially among 
the young, has this one mistaken phrase 
driven forever away from the kingdom of God ? 
Instead of making Christ attractive, it makes 
Him out a taskmaster, narrowing life by petty 
restrictions, calling for self-denial where none is 
necessary, making misery a virtue under the 
plea that it is the yoke of Christ, and happi- 
ness criminal because it now and then evades 
it. According to this conception, Christians 
are at best the victims of a depressing fate ; 
their life is a penance ; and their hope for the 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 43 

next world purchased by a slow martyrdom in 
this. 

The mistake has arisen from taking the 
word " yoke " here in the same sense as in the 
expressions " under the yoke," or " wear the 
yoke in his youth." But in Christ's illustration 
it is not thejuguni of the Roman soldier, but 
the simple " harness " or " ox-collar " of the 
Eastern peasant. It is the literal wooden yoke 
which He, with His own hands in the carpenter 
shop, had probably often made. He knew the 
difference between a smooth yoke and a rough 
one, a bad fit and a good fit ; the difference 
also it made to the patient animal which had 
to wear it. The rough yoke galled, and the 
burden was heavy ; the smooth yoke caused 
no pain, and the load was lightly drawn. The 
badly fitted harness was a misery ; the well- 
fitted collar was " easy." 



44 PAX VOBISCUM. 

And what was the " burden " ? It was not 
some special burden laid upon the Christian, 
some unique infliction that they alone must 
bear. It was what all men bear. It was sim- 
ply life, human life itself, the general burden 
of life which all must carry with them from 
the cradle to the grave. Christ saw that men 
took life painfully. To some it was a weari- 
ness, to others a failure, to many a tragedy, to 
all a struggle and a pain. How to carry this 
burden of life had been the whole world's 
problem. It is still the whole world's prob- 
lem. And here is Christ's solution : " Carry it 
as I do. Take life as I take it. Look at it 
from My point of view. Interpret it upon My 
principles. Take My yoke and learn of Me, 
and you will find it easy. For My yoke is 
easy, works easily, sits right upon the shoul- 
ders, and therefore My burden is light." 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 45 

There is no suggestion here that religion 
will absolve any man from bearing burdens. 
That would be to absolve him from living, 
since it is life itself that is the burden. 
What Christianity does propose is to make 
it tolerable. Christ's yoke is simply His 
secret for the alleviation of human life, His 
prescription for the best and happiest 
method of living. Men harness themselves 
to the work and stress of the world in clumsy 
and unnatural ways. The harness they put 
on is antiquated. A rough, ill-fitted collar 
at the best, they make its strain and friction 
past enduring, by placing it where the neck 
is most sensitive ; and by mere continuous 
irritation this sensitiveness increases until 
the whole nature is quick and sore. 

. This is the origin, among other things, of a 
disease called " touchiness " — a disease which, 



46 PAX VOBISCUM. 

in spite of its innocent name, is one of the 
gravest sources of restlessness in the world. 
Touchiness, when it becomes chronic, is a 
morbid condition of the inward disposition. 
It is self-love inflamed to the acute point ; 
conceit, with a hair-trigger. The cure is to 
shift the yoke to some other place ; to let men 
and things touch us through some new and 
perhaps as yet unused part of our nature ; to 
become meek and lowly in heart while the 
old nature is becoming numb from want of 
use. It is the beautiful work of Christianity 
everywhere to adjust the burden of life to 
those who bear it, and them to it. It has a 
perfectly miraculous gift of healing. Without 
doing any violence to human nature it sets it 
right with life, harmonizing -it with all sur- 
rounding things, and restoring those who are 
jaded with the fatigue and dust of the world to 



WHAT YOKES ARE FOR. 47 

a new grace of living. In the mere matter of 
altering the perspective of life and changing 
the proportions of things, its function in light- 
ening the care of man is altogether its own. 
The weight of a load depends upon the at- 
traction of the earth. But suppose the attrac- 
tion of the earth were removed ? A ton on some 
other planet, where the attraction of gravity is 
less, does not weigh half a ton. Now Chris- 
tianity removes the attraction of the earth ; 
and this is one way in which it diminishes 
men's burden. It makes them citizens of an- 
other world. What was a ton yesterday is not 
half a ton to-day. So without changing one's 
circumstances, merely by offering a wider 
horizon and a different standard, it alters the 
whole aspect of the world. 

Christianity as Christ taught is the truest 
philosophy of life ever spoken. But let us be 



48 PAX VOBISCUM. 

quite sure when we speak of Christianity that 
we mean Christ's Christianity. Other versions 
are either caricatures, or exaggerations, or 
misunderstandings, or shortsighted and sur- 
face readings. For the most part their attain- 
ment is hopeless and the results wretched. 
But I care not who the person is, or through 
what vale of tears he has passed, or is about to 
pass, there is a new life for him along this 
path. 




-» 




HOW FRUITS GROW. 

Were Rest my subject, there are other 
things I should wish to say about it, and other 
kinds of Rest of which I should like to speak. 
But that is not my subject. My theme is that 
the Christian experiences are not the work of 
magic, but come under the law of Cause and 
Effect. And I have chosen Rest only as a 
single illustration of the working of that prin- 
ciple. If there were time I might next run 
over all the Christian experiences in turn, and 
show how the same wide law applies to each. 
But I think it may serve the better purpose if 

I leave this further exercise to yourselves. J 
4 



50 PAX VOBISCUM. 

know no Bible study that you will find more 
full of fruit, or which will take you nearer to 
the ways of God, or make the Christian life 
itself more solid or more sure. I shall add 
only a single other illustration of what I mean, 
before I close. 

Where does Joy come from ? I knew a 
Sunday scholar whose conception of Joy was 
that it was a thing made in lumps and kept 
somewhere in Heaven, and that when people 
prayed for it, pieces were somehow let down 
and fitted into their souls. I am not sure 
that views as gross and material are not often 
held by people who ought to be wiser. In 
reality, Joy is as much a matter of Cause and 
Effect as pain. No one can get Joy by merely 
asking for it. It is one of the ripest fruits of 
the Christian life, and, like all fruits, must be 
grown. There is a very clever trick in India 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 5 1 

called the mango-trick. A seed is put in the 
ground and covered up, and after divers in- 
cantations a full-blown mango-bush appears 
within five minutes. I never met any one who 
knew how the thing was done, but I never 
met any one who believed it to be anything 
else than a conjuring-trick. The world is 
pretty unanimous now in its belief in the order- 
liness of Nature. Men may not know how 
fruits grow, but they do know that they can- 
not grow in five minutes. Some lives have not 
even a stalk on which fruits could hang, even 
if they did grow in five minutes. Some have 
never planted one sound seed of Joy in all 
their lives ; and others who may have planted 
a germ or two have lived so little in sunshine 
that they never could come to maturity. 

Whence, then, is joy? Christ put His teach- 
ing upon this subject into one of the most 



52 PAX VOBISCUM. 



exquisite of His parables. I should in any 
instance have appealed to His teaching here, 
as in the case of Rest, for I do not wish you 
to think I am speaking words of my own. But 
it so happens that He has dealt with it in 
words of unusual fulness. 

I need not recall the whole illustration. It 
is the parable of the Vine. Did you ever 
think why Christ spoke that parable? He did 
not merely throw it into space as a fine illus- 
tration of general truths. It was not simply a 
statement of the mystical union, and the doc- 
trine of an indwelling Christ. It was that ; but 
it was more. After He had said it, He did 
what was not an unusual thing when He was 
teaching His greatest lessons. He turned to 
the disciples and said He would tell them why 
He had spoken it. It was to tell them how to 
get Joy. " These things have I spoken unto 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 53 

you," He said, " that My Joy might remain 
in you and that your Joy might be full." It 
was a purposed and deliberate communication 
of His secret of Happiness. 

Go back over these verses, then, and you 
will find the Causes of this Effect, the spring, 
and the only spring, out of which true Happi- 
ness comes. I am not going to analyse them 
in detail. I ask you to enter into the words 
for yourselves. Remember, in the first place, 
that the Vine was the Eastern symbol of Joy. 
It was its fruit that made glad the heart of 
man. Yet, however innocent that gladness — 
for the expressed juice of the grape was the 
common drink at every peasant's board — the 
gladness was only a gross and passing thing. 
This was not true happiness, and the vine 
of the Palestine vineyards was not the true 
vine. Christ was " the true Vine." Here, 



54 PAX VOBISCUM. 



then, is the ultimate source of Joy. Through 
whatever media it reaches us, all true Joy and 
Gladness find their source in Christ. By this, 
of course, is not meant that the actual Joy 
experienced is transferred from Christ's nat* 
ure, or is something passed on from Him to 
us. What is passed on is His method of 
getting it. There is, indeed, a sense in which 
we can share another's joy or another's sor- 
row. But that is another matter. Christ is 
the source of Joy to men in the sense in which 
He is the source of Rest. His people share 
His life, and therefore share its consequences, 
and one of these is Joy. His method of living 
is one that in the nature of things produces 
Joy. When He spoke of His Joy remaining 
with us He meant in part that the causes 
which produced it should continue to act. 
His followers, that is to say, by repeating 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 55 

His life would experience its accompani- 
ments. His Joy, His kind of Joy, would 
remain with them. 

The medium through which this Joy comes 
is next explained : " He that abideth in Me, 
the same bringeth forth much fruit." Fruit 
first, Joy next ; the one the cause or medium 
of the other. Fruit-bearing is the necessary 
antecedent ; Joy both the necessary conse- 
quent and the necessary accompaniment. It 
lay partly in the bearing fruit, partly in the 
fellowship which made that possible. Partly, 
that is to say, Joy lay in mere constant living 
in Christ's presence, with all that that implied 
of peace, of shelter, and of love ; partly in the 
influence of that Life upon mind and charac- 
ter and will ; and partly in the inspiration to 
live and work for others, with all that that 
brings of self-riddance and Joy in others' 



56 PAX VOBISCUM. 



gain. All these, in different ways and at dif- 
ferent times, are sources of pure Happiness. 
Even the simplest of them — to do good to 
other people — is an instant and infallible spe- 
cific. There is no mystery about Happiness 
whatever. Put in the right ingredients and it 
must come out. He that abideth in Him will 
bring forth much fruit ; and bringing forth 
much fruit is Happiness. The infallible re- 
ceipt for Happiness, then, is to do good ; and 
the infallible receipt for doing good is to abide 
in Christ. The surest proof that all this is a 
plain matter of Cause and Effect is that men 
may try every other conceivable way of find- 
ing Happiness, and they will fail. Only the 
right cause in each case can produce the right 
effect. 

Then the Christian experiences are our 
own making? In the same sense in which 



HOW FRUITS GROW. 57 

grapes are our own making, and no more. All 
fruits grow — whether they grow in the soil or 
in the soul ; whether they are the fruits of the 
wild grape or of the True Vine. No man can 
make things grow. He can get them to grow 
by arranging all the circumstances and fulfill- 
ing all the conditions. But the growing is 
done by God. Causes and effects are eternal 
arrangements, set in the constitution of the 
world ; fixed beyond man's ordering. What 
man can do is to place himself in the midst 
of a chain of sequences. Thus he can get 
things to grow: thus he himself can grow. 
But the grower is the Spirit of God. 

What more need I add but this — test the 
method by experiment. Do not imagine that 
you have got these things because you know 
how to get them. As well try to feed upon a 
cookery book. But I think I can promise that 



58 PAX VOBISCUM. 

if you try in this simple and natural way, you 
will not fail. Spend the time you have spent 
in sighing for fruits in fulfilling the conditions 
of their growth. The fruits will come, must 
come. We have hitherto paid immense at- 
tention to effects, to the mere experiences 
themselves ; we have described them, extolled 
them, advised them, prayed for them — done 
everything but find out what caused them. 
Henceforth let us deal with causes. " To 
be," says Lotze, " is to be in relations." 
About every other method of living the 
Christian life there is an uncertainty. About 
every other method of acquiring the Christian 
experiences there is a " perhaps." But in so 
far as this method is the way of nature, it can- 
not fail. Its guarantee is the laws of the 
universe, and these are " the Hands of the 
Living God." 



THE TRUE VINE. 59 



THE TRUE VINE. 

" I AM the true vine, and my Father is the 
husbandman. Every branch in me that bear- 
eth not fruit he taketh away : and every 
branch that beareth fruit, he purgeth it, that 
it may bring forth more fruit. Now ye are 
clean through the word which I have spoken 
unto you. Abide in me, and I in you. As 
the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, ex- 
cept it abide in the vine ; no more can ye, 
except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye 
are the branches : He that abideth in me, 
and I in him, the same bringeth forth much 
fruit : for without me ye can do nothing. If 
a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as 
a branch, and is withered ; and men gather 
them, and cast them into the fire, and they 
are burned. If ye abide in me, and my 
word abide in you, ye shall ask what ye 
will, and it shall be done unto you. Herein 



CO PAX VOBISCUM. 

is my Father glorified, that ye bear much 
fruit ; so ye shall be my disciples. As the 
Father hath loved me, so have I loved 
you : continue ye in my love. If ye keep 
my commandments, ye shall abide in my 
love; even as I have kept my Father's 
commandments, and abide in his love. These 
things have I spoken unto you, that my 
joy might remain in you, and that your joy 
might be full." 



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